Abstract
Recent progress in pretraining language models on large corpora has resulted in significant performance gains on many NLP tasks. These large models acquire linguistic knowledge during pretraining, which helps to improve performance on downstream tasks via fine-tuning. To assess what kind of knowledge is acquired, language models are commonly probed by querying them with ‘fill in the blank’ style cloze questions. Existing probing datasets mainly focus on knowledge about relations between words and entities. We introduce WDLMPro (Word Definitions Language Model Probing) to evaluate word understanding directly using dictionary definitions of words. In our experiments, three popular pretrained language models struggle to match words and their definitions. This indicates that they understand many words poorly and that our new probing task is a difficult challenge that could help guide research on LMs in the future.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.eacl-main.42
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 532–538
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.42
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.42
- Cite (ACL):
- Lutfi Kerem Senel and Hinrich Schütze. 2021. Does She Wink or Does She Nod? A Challenging Benchmark for Evaluating Word Understanding of Language Models. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 532–538, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Does She Wink or Does She Nod? A Challenging Benchmark for Evaluating Word Understanding of Language Models (Senel & Schütze, EACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.eacl-main.42.pdf
- Data
- WNLaMPro